Evening/Weekend

Among those of us part-time students going through on-campus recruiting (and for whom this past Saturday’s “OCR is Not for Me” event may have felt especially appealing these days), campus interviews are well under way.

All the effort of spending your summer scheduling informational interviews that filled nearly every free 30-minute window on your calendar—maybe with cryptic event names so your manager wouldn’t get suspicious, constantly checking your Google Alerts and Twitter right up until the last possible moment to peruse any news on your target companies, and powering through hundreds of case and behavioral interview questions with your classmates (how about another mini-case during the mid-class break?), you show up to the second floor of Harper Center in the suit you should have gotten dry-cleaned 3 uses ago and everything is seemingly on the line.

Because of these interviews—the dreaded (and, at times, highly anticipated) moments of truth, you perhaps have neglected any of or all the following: an adequate amount of sleep, proper hygiene, some homework, some of your actual work, your family, your friends, your significant other, your pet, and maybe the odd bill.

Alas, it will all be worthwhile once you sign on for that package of a $300,000 salary, $100,000 signing bonus, and the 35 vacation days you negotiated so passionately for.

Nevertheless, the glimmer of the end goal that we Evening/Weekend OCR participants are chasing can overshadow the numerous successes that we have accomplished to this point, such as:

Finishing at least 12 classes by the end of summer quarter 2017—that’s 60 percent of the non-LEAD coursework required for a degree!

Keeping up with all the deadlines that popped up over the summer, during which GTS became your best friend (up until the layout change, then you had to start all over again)

Responding to the accountability survey, for those who opted in, and acting on the kick in the butt you got to remind you to get moving when it became clear from the survey questions that you were a little behind

Landing interviews, which indicate that you did, in fact, do the due diligence necessary to get past initial resume screening and get yourself in front of people further down the pipeline of making hiring decisions—congrats!

Now, we find ourselves heading into the midway point of week four this quarter (although you may feel a lot further into the quarter if you are recruiting into consulting and have been packing on the Coffee Chats since early September). It might have become just a little more salient to you that your days in business school are numbered—after all, you only have as many as eight classes to go or as few as the one last that you are wrapping up this very quarter.

Further, as OCR participants, we must not only concentrate on (and celebrate, as appropriate) our successes in the job hunt. We should also make time to maximize the finite time we have left in the broader pursuit of our MBA degrees—the core reason why we are here at Booth.

Whether you have a little more than six weeks or more than six months left at Booth, take advantage of the experiences you can only have as a student here, now. Go to the next TAC, keep your schedule open in January/February for the Winter Formal, organize a reunion happy hour for your LAUNCH group—have fun.

Chicago Business is the Booth newspaper and online news source. Entirely student-run and published every two weeks, the paper is the "voice of the students." The publication updates students and alumni on all the latest Booth life, news, and humor.